Come get your slop
First sentence of the top comment:
I kinda wish we got rid of the dichotomy of capitalism vs communism/socialism.
ok I'm not reading any more of this trash
Redditors looking for a "3rd way", and as usual it's just the 1st way with more racial slurs and free healthcare for whites. :pit:
It’s amazing how once you know the Liberal ideological tropes they are so repetitive
I want tv tropes but for liberalism, maybe a compilation by citations needed
Reddit comments "Socialism is when the government does stuff. All of our countries are a mixture of socialism and capitalism."
:screm-a: aaaaaaaaaaa
if I weren't super double secret banned from reddit I would post that Wolff autotune
I am super double ultra secret banned.
They will have to enter the net manually and peel me from between the transistors if they want to stop me spreading communism on their site.
Top comment:
I kinda wish we got rid of the dichotomy of capitalism vs communism/socialism.
Our economies are neither purely 1 or the other. All are a combination in facets of multiple ideologies.
We had unfettered capitalism in the US in the early 20th century, but while enormous economic growth happened at that time, life was still pretty terrible for the average workers with horrible exploitation and child labor.
And we've never seen a purely communist economy in place, because it would be literally impossible for a single entity in the government to be able to direct resources and needs of every single citizen and industry of an entire country.
Ever since the 20th century, our economies have continued to be a hybrid of capitalism and socialism.
Conflating any mention of Karl Marx to a full on communist government/economy is just pseudointellectual partisan brainshitting. Same with conflating capitalism to only bad shit that happens.
And he's a power poster at /r/libertarian :sus-soviet:
Conflating any mention of Karl Marx to a full on communist government/economy is just pseudointellectual partisan brainshitting. Same with conflating capitalism to only bad shit that happens.
Literally wrote the COMMUNIST manifesto, not the lets tax the rich and pay a bit higher wages while we hold hands together and vote manifesto.
I don’t think they lobotomized this guy so much as they scooped out half his parietal lobe
To be fair, the demands in the manifesto litreally include shit like progressive tax rates and universal education.
Yes to wrest capital by degree away from the bourgeois with the understanding these policies would be unsustainable and would outstrip themselves, leading towards accelerating class struggle.
Basically Marx proposes these policies as the front of a wedge, not as eternal communist policies
The labor theory of value is so intuitively and obviously correct to me now that I can barely understand why people still bicker about it. The guy nailed it, next question. For it to be out of favor sounds to me like saying that calculus is out of favor, or Newtonian physics is out of favor.
Even most of it's "rebuttal" doesn't actually disprove the core of the theory, but rather the superficial details like what happens in the point of sale or in the free market. Things are only valuable if you put work into it. If something is worthless to you but worth something to other, it still does not change the fact that to acquire that thing you have to put work into making the product come into fruition in the first place.
Like this slightly more thought out variant of the mudpie argument I've heard, this time with berry pie. Suppose a village have a species of berries that everyone is allergic to, meaning that any labor put into them; like cooking them into pies; would be socially useless and thus making it worthless, yet if there's a neighboring village that's not allergic to the berry and is willing to buy berry pies, that means value is subjective! ...except that you know, the allergic villagers have to put work into gathering the berries, baking them into pies, and transporting them to the neighboring village. If the allergic villagers refuse to work with the berries, then berries will never generate any value in a million year no matter how theoretically valuable, unless the berry lovers go the berries and produce pies themselves, which to them is a socially necessary labor.
"Supreme brick!" the clay have to be mined from the ground, baked into bricks with the branding, packaged, and delivered. "Cryptocurrency!" you have to produce computers that can produce the cryptocurrency whose system must be programmed by the labor of programmers. "Gamer girl bath water!" the gamer girl still have to do the labor of bathing, packaging, marketing, and delivering the goods. The moment things no longer require labor to generate value is the moment humanity have either went extinct or achieved godhood.
Right even Marx himself talks about how price will often deviate from value in the first chapters of Capital vol. 1. He didn't go into great detail about the LTV because at the time, pretty much everyone (including the bourgeois political economists) took the LTV for granted.
And pretty much as a rule, the prices are almost never equal to the value. But Marx did hold three aggregate equalities, namely that total values equal total prices, total surplus value equals total profit, and total price rate of profit equals total value rate of profit.
“Gamer girl bath water!” the gamer girl still have to do the labor of bathing, packaging, marketing, and delivering the goods.
hexbear try not to sabotage my business ideas challenge
:bloomer: you saw that one guy with <100 karma replying to the top post that wasn't completely fucked though?
Yeah, I did, but what's worse than a highly upvoted bad comment is a million relatively well upvoted bad comments that're all bad for a different reason
An article from the Jacobin (say what you will about them) getting highly-upvoted on a sub like r-economy, along with the visible non-brainrotted comments disseminating actual leftist theory, would have been unimaginable years ago.
lmao that one dork being like "LTV has been thoroughly debunked" only to respond with " but but but muh marginal utility" when pressed, completely ignoring that those two concepts are completely different
"Post left" weirdos🤝 capitalists:
Labour theory of value has been debunked!!!11
It certainly didn't help that the Jacobin article itself opens with:
Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. But its technical validity is less important than the core message
It's weird, I feel like I've been seeing a lot of anti LTV takes from leftists lately (and I don't mean "post leftists" as they are by definition not leftist). A recent Vikki1999 video also comes to mind.
Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor.
notice how they say "marx-friendly" and not "marxist". which does all the heavy lifting for them.
Oh nice I didn't realize there was an update on that one. I only saw the statement of fact*
*it's true
Cuban gusano spotted in the thread claiming authority about how Marxism is evil and he knows because he's from a Marxist country.
those stupid commies forcing all the slaves I left behind to learn how to read :angery:
"Jacobin is an echo chamber" i cry, denying that mainstream economics is nothing but a circlejerk.
Some of the best places to work in the world are capitalist. Go look at the great socialist countries
Greatest reduction in poverty in world history, to such an extent that think tanks are able to lie about poverty going down because China improved so much while poverty increased worldwide
In that thread if you reply that China is an outrageously successful economy they'll respond that China is capitalist, lol.
Damn, sure is curious why India isn't doing as well as they are, or why Russia wasn't able to pull of a China after embracing capitalism.
Russia's sitting on a dragon's hoard of black gold, you'd think...
:graeber: made the point that almost all of the world's hot economic growth spots in the latter half of the twentieth century have been in places explicitly not following a hypercapitalist model
These people never fucking learn that the "good" capitalist countries are only possible because they export the worst of their misery to the global south
that would require reckoning with imperialism, but the imperialists tell them "actually those countries are bad and authoritarian, and we're bringing them freedom with coups, IMF loans, structural adjustment programs, and lethal aid!"
I've had some mild success when "debating" (hate that term) with family members, by pointing out that while Denmark has some extremely stringent environmental laws, Danish companies ("our companies") don't give a shit about their supposed "clean image" whenever they do business in the global south, and they can and will pollute just as much as every other company thinks they can get away with.
Which prominent Marxist economists have rejected the LTV? Serious question, I genuinely do not know
LTV? From the handful that are currently relevant none of them that I heard but I could be wrong.
There is some "debate"(not really only if you are stubborn) in other areas mainly because Harvey in general sucks and he rejects the theory of Marx's falling rate of profit as the source of capitalist crisis, despite the evidence collected so far.
he rejects the theory of Marx’s falling rate of profit as the source of capitalist crisis, despite the evidence collected so far.
Lol, fr? What does he think is attributed to this? Like even committed capitalists and liberals understand this mechanism.
Too many people on the left buy the financialization idea i.e somewhere around the 1980s the financial institutions dominate the economy so much that their well being determines the fate of the economy, that wall street is the main problem because it is too much of a parasite on the real "industrial" economy and if you could control or regulate Wall street then "industrial" capitalism would go back to working just fine.
This is very appealing to many because mainstream economists also like this theory, it means the problem isn't capitalism itself but some small part of it that can be fixed. But this is also extremely anti-Marxist theory as while finance capital does exist and it is undeniably a problem, the falling rate of profit(and the empirical evidence) shows capitalism will suffer from crisis despite financial capital and there is no return to the golden age of the 50s anymore ever.
There is more on MR blog here if you are interested. Harvey also debated about the law of value too.
I've never seen a coherent description of why it's wrong aside from a thinly veiled "my tribal flag says I disagree."
It come across like saying Newton's work was debunked because it doesn't describe some quantum obscurity despite it obviously still being useful and correct.
Or it's like saying Newton's work is debunked because the earth is flat. I can't tell you if the competing theories are actually better, but I don't think they're proven.
Or that mushrooms are debunked because it's low in iron.
There's a lot that's interesting to read, but you'll probably only see people cheering their team's chants in that thread.
I think most Marxists would agree it's a poor determiner of price, at least nowadays, and for classical economists there's no such thing as value as distinct from price, so they probably see that as a gotchya.
It's literally not supposed to predict prices though, as a concept? Not under capitalism at least. It's just a recognition that people doing stuff is the only thing that makes commodities with use values that can be exchanged for cash. The common denominator is making stuff. When your resource extraction occurs at the barrel of a gun, of course it's unrelated to price. But of course, the value of a phone is indeed the socially necessary labor time to mine the rare earth minerals, process them, ship them to component fabs, ship components to assembly fabs, code the software, design the hardware, etc. The part of this that is least abstracted is the resource extraction because technological innovation has not made it a cheaper capital investment to develop fully autonomous mining rigs when your former colony is just sitting like right there nearby and you have their guys that own the guns by the balls.
Haven't read him but I believe G. A. Cohen didn't like the LTV and tried to divorce it from Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation. He also didn't like dialectical materialism and thought it was metaphysical BS thrown in by Marx.
This would be an excellent opportunity to drop some Second Thought videos in the thread, like this one: https://youtu.be/fpKsygbNLT4
